So, here's what's positive about the 2020 Animaniacs: No episode featured a one-off gag I didn't at least chuckle at. That's a lot of negativity to expound on a cartoon, no matter how designedly negative the cartoon is. At one point, a caricature of Seth Meyers is seen drinking from a mug that reads "Smug," which is about as explicit a "pot calling kettle" moment as I've ever seen on television.
Instead of successfully having bite, it plays more like obviously fake vampire teeth - and it sidelines three of our most splendidly wild animated comedy characters into delivering arms-folded, uninvested wisecracks about stuff happening to them, rather than making stuff happen. The scripts stare at our modern world with a head on a swivel, eager to poke at every single aspect (especially if it involves a modicum of progressivism, but also if it involves joked-to-death topics like Russian trolls and Trumpism) and call it dumb. "Woke jokes" run rampant, with trite and hackneyed observations about current-day hipsters and how sensitive they are. The opening crack about how wild and funny it is that bathrooms have gender-neutral signs is only the tip of the iceberg of this strangely conservative-leaning shift in comic voice.
Here, the returning cast and new showrunner Wellesley Wild (of Family Guyfame, which brings a lot of this show's venomous new tone shift into context) paint the Animaniacs as our voices of reason our figureheads of intelligence reacting to a world gone mad our Jim Halperts, not our Michael Scotts.
Applying the same joke to a more frivolous host, like Jimmy Fallon, would not be much funnier, but at least it would kind of make sense.Not so in the new version. It’s an odd segment that makes fun of a version of Seth Meyers with no basis in reality - Meyers being the late-night host most openly interested in giving airtime to unusual topics and more incisive political commentary. (It’s worth noting that the showrunner of the Animaniacs reboot is a Family Guy alum.) Animaniacs, meanwhile, spends a whole Pinky and the Brain segment lambasting Seth Meyers and cute animal memes. And Family Guy has created a whole genre of television where the whole point is in self-aware asides to the audience. Rick and Morty is a genre-hopping adventure that lampoons genre tropes while also having plenty to say about the entertainment landscape. Trouble is, there have been other shows doing excellent showbiz satire in the Animaniacs’ absence, like BoJack Horseman, which managed to skewer Hollywood and the new media ecosystem that now covers it. Mostly, the new Animaniacs seems to be attempting to succeed using the old formula.
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